14. Multilingual LaTeX

The original versions of TeX and LaTeX were set up for the English language, American variant. The built-in hyphenation patterns were for English only, and several English words such as ‘Figure’ and ‘Bibliography’ were included explicitly in certain commands. This in fact violates the rules of good programming that forbid doing anything explicitly. In Europe, LaTeX users quickly made customizations for their particular languages. The adaptation for German, german.sty, is a set of macros from many contributors collected together by H. Partl of the Technical University of Vienna, and it has become the standard for the German-speaking TeX Users Group (DANTE). It contains some facilities for other languages, including French and English.

The key to the german package and other language adaptations is that the standard LaTeX document styles (and later classes for LaTeX 2ε) had been altered so that explicit English words in the output were replaced by reprogrammable command names. These names had become standardized among European users for application to all languages. The modified LaTeX version by J. Schrod from Darmstadt was known as ILaTeX, for International LaTeX. These names and their standard English values are to be found in Section D.3.1.